Receiving Social Support Motivates Proximal and Distant Prosocial Behaviors

Prosocial behaviors –actions aimed to benefit other individuals, groups, or communities– are important for promoting and maintaining a healthy society. Extant research on the contextual factors that make individuals more likely to engage in prosocial behaviors has mainly looked at their short-term effects taking place in the immediate environment, potentially overlooking their impact in more distant domains. Building on attachment theory, we theorize that an interpersonal factor—receiving social support—can foster prosocial behaviors both in the short- and in the long-term. Moreover, receiving social support can have spillover effects beyond the environment in which the support was received. Receiving social support increases felt security—a sense of care, esteem, love, and safety—which in turn increases motivation to engage in behaviors that benefit others. We test our hypotheses with cross-sectional, longitudinal, and experimental data. In Study 1, data from a sample of international business school alumni show a significant positive relationship between receiving social support and engaging in prosocial behaviors both within and beyond the environment in which support was received. Study 2 leverages data of US adults in a multi-wave study to show that receiving social support predicts prosocial activities several years later. Study 3 experimentally manipulates social support with a sample of working US adults and finds that receiving social support fosters prosocial behaviors through boosting felt security which in turn increases prosocial motivation. Overall, our findings show that receiving social support can affect short- and long-term prosocial behaviors with spillover effect beyond the immediate environment